


eyes on the horizon

by MarauderCracker



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Aventine, F/M, More world-building than actual fic, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-09 00:34:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7780009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarauderCracker/pseuds/MarauderCracker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the maps that Monty's built with years of work tell them they're still in the Thirteen Clans' territory, a group of five travelers coming from the South tell them about an old town just at the very edge of the Azgeda Queen's rule, close enough for trade but still uninhabited.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eyes on the horizon

**Author's Note:**

> I spent the weekend at a small town near home that's being slowly swallowed up by the rising sea levels and the scenery made me think of Raven Reyes.

When the first warning comes, Raven's instinct is to refuse. She wants to cling to this land, to claw at it, to grip this home they've made with a hold so strong that nobody can move her. She wants to be a mountain --she thinks, furious, that she could blow them all up, put a bullet between the eyes of every Azgeda leader, claim her ownership of this earth with fire and blood.   
King Roan's successor is a bloodthirsty woman, and she will only warn them once. When her envoy announces that they have to leave the territory or be burned to ashes by the new Azgeda queen and her army, Raven thinks of grabbing the revolver strapped to Bellamy's thigh and shooting him point blank. She swallows down the thought.   
Aventine is merely five years old when King Roan dies. They've built small cots around the dropship, raised a new wall that circles the settlement, set up hunting traps on the woods that surround them. They've birthed children here. They've built lives. And now Roan is dead, their peace treaty dead with him, and they have to leave or fight.   
Eighty people against an army of thousands, even with their guns and bombs, are not shining odds for the Aventine settlement.   
She tells Bellamy, with angry hot tears burning at her eyes, that she thinks they should leave. Bell is the one to talk to their people, but she stands right by his side. She couldn't speak the words out loud without choking on them, she knows herself well enough to know that she wouldn't want to cry in front of everyone. But it hurts, it hurts to hear Bellamy say it as much as it'd hurt to stand up and admit that they can't stay. That this home is no longer theirs.   
Her hip and knee scream in pain as they walk away.  
They travel down south, the weather getting hotter the further down they go. As the air gets drier, Raven's pain gets more bearable. She still struggles to walk for more than a couple miles --Bellamy and Nathan softly coaxing her to stay on one of their few horses, insisting to take whatever weight she's carrying, pretending to be tired themselves when they notice her clenching her jaw in pain-- but it gets easier now that the cold weather up North isn't eating at her bones.   
When the maps that Monty's built with years of work tell them they're still in the Thirteen Clans' territory, a group of five travelers coming from the South tell them about an old town just at the very edge of the Azgeda Queen's rule, close enough for trade but still uninhabited. The travelers have the strong jaws and mouths that Raven identifies as belonging to her Grandfather, speak a variation of trigedasleng that tastes like childhood on her tongue. Raven remember just enough Spanish from her mother to understand the structure of their language, to guess by similitude what each word means.  
It takes them two months to reach the town. The weight they gained during the past couple years has banished, and there are new blisters on their feet and new calluses on their hands; a couple new scars from squabbles with thieves and Azgeda soldiers.   
When Raven first sees the town, her lungs feel like they're trying to close in on themselves.  
The entrance was once guarded by a statue of a Cherokee chief, now missing one hand and his head. They can't find the town's name anywhere, though a couple of the hotels still hold up broken-down billboards. It looks like it must have been a touristic town --hotels and half-drowned entertainment parks, a lake nearby still holding the remains of a small dock. Most of it has been swallowed by water, the city now turned into a tow where the taller buildings stand like islands. Fish and terrifying luminous creatures populate the thin streams that cross the town.  
The first night, Raven sits at Bellamy's side as he stands on a rooftop with a sniper rifle, and she falls asleep like that. In her dreams she sees the digital photographs of Venice that she used to stare at as kid, she replays the old educational videos about the Maya's floating cities. When she wakes up with the sun on her face, Bellamy's jacket covers her shoulders and he's still staring at the horizon, the rifle hanging from his back.   
She sits down with Monty the very next day, while the others try to work the last of their food into a soup that can feed eighty people, and they start drawing the plans for a bridge.   
Monty smokes a mixture of the weed they'd grown in their farm in Aventine with some herbs they've collected along the way and insists they climb up to the roof of the tallest building, and Raven starts calculating the dimensions for the bridges they'll build.   
That night Bryan stands watch and Bellamy shares a thin mattress with her, his arms tight around her torso, her fingers digging into the small of his back. She dreams of a city that doesn't yet exist, of hanging bridges that go from building to building and boats that slide softly over the calm waters. The sun filters in through what was once a high window, and Bellamy is looking at her with soft eyes when she wakes up.   
It's always hot down here, the weather dry but relentless, warm winds blowing from the South and carrying red sand with them.  
There isn't much to hunt around the town, but they more than make up for it with the fish and plants, and they slowly start carrying earth into the buildings to grow the seeds they've carried with them.  
The Nomads first arrive during the winter, looking for the warmth of the Equator after the snow has swallowed up most of the Thirteen Clans' territory.   
They speak a jumbled variation of trigedasleng, words from Spanish and what one of the kids recognizes as Cantonese mixed with the traditional trikru language, a grammatical structure that confuses almost everyone --Raven and most of the other bilingual people too. They carry weapons, but offer them to Nathan, Bellamy and Bryan without being asked to when they enter the town's limits.   
"Venimos en paz," the woman that seems to lead them tells Nathan, and Bryan rushes to get Raven.   
The Nomads travel every year from the waterfalls up in what used to be Canada to the Caribbean, setting down camp here and there, trading with the Clans and hunting for a couple weeks before moving again.   
"Traemos semillas, hierbas medicinales, metales. We mean no harm."  
Just like they took in members of the Clans and Skaikru who'd decided to leave Arkadia, they offer the Nomads the possibility of staying for however long they need, as long as they help as much as they possibly can within their abilities.  
"We value information, stories and whatever skill we can learn," Raven tells them, standing as proudly as she can while leaning her weight on the cane that aids her when she walks. Bellamy at her left, Monty to her right. The bridge hands at her back, the only way to access the town on foot now that they've fenced a circle around the water. They've been slowly widening the streams by blowing up whole stretches of ground to let the water flow.  
Their tacit leader is called Esperanza, just like her Grandmother was. She's got sweet dark eyes and light brown hair that falls in thick dreadlocks down to the middle of her back. She sings songs that mutated from old Creole and travels down to the Caribbean every year to honor her family's remains.   
She tells them about the ruins of Maya temples, of the stair-like pyramids that remain even when skyscrapers have crumbled. Some of them still remember the old Maya mythology, the history as it was told by their elders instead of misconstrued by the flimsy understanding of foreign historians.   
Bellamy manages to bargain for access to a few of the books they carry, trading in favors to get one of the few Spanish-speakers on their small travelling community to hand-write a copy for him. They perfect their papermaking process that year, creating thin sheets of yellowish cellulose that are just enough to transcribe four novels, a poetic anthology and a book about the three first World Wars. One of the novels was in Korean, and Sung --a man in his forties who escaped the Flowkru during the wars among the Thirteen Clans, and eventually found a place with them-- transcribed and later translated that one. Bellamy finds the Korean alphabet equally beautiful and unattainable. He's got a passion for history and a facility for math, but the attempt to learn a new alphabet fails miserably.  
Raven teaches the Nomads how to repair and repurpose cellphones and car radios into working communication devices; Esperanza gives them seeds from up North and instructs on how to care for them.  
When they leave two month later, Raven's heart aches. They leave plenty behind --songs and myths and stories, maps and seeds and wires and scraps of metal, car engines they'd found on the way, inks and dyes and a promise to come back next year-- but it feels like a part of her home is abandoning her, once again. Raven buries the feeling deep inside her chest and doesn't cling to Esperanza's shoulders when they hug goodbye.   
For months after the Nomads' departure, she stands on the tallest roof, between the solar panels they're slowly building, and stares at the horizon down South, wishing she could see far enough to witness the Maya pyramids with her own eyes.


End file.
